Measuring Quantum Systems with FPGAs

Abstract

In the pursuit of a superconducting implementation of a quantum computer, measurement of quantum systems, whether simple signal averaging or complex correlation functions, is key. In the typical scheme, a digitizer card digitizes the analog output signal of a superconducting quantum computing microwave experiment, then transfers the raw, unprocessed data to the host computer where it is processed in software. This data transfer is a bottleneck. Thus, for this thesis, we designed an FPGA architecture on-board the digitizer card to pre-process the data in hardware so that less of it has to be transferred to computer, thereby drastically reducing data transfer time, and paving the way for larger-scale experiments. We designed two architectures: one optimized for amplitude averaging and power averaging, and another that lays the groundwork for computing correlation functions.